Monday, August 24, 2009

Public Library of Science (PLoS) has launched "PLoS Currents"(Beta), A innovative and experimental website to share the research results and ideas rapidly.Keeping up with current issues and responding to the recent worldwide H1N1 influenza outbreak, the first PLoS Currents research theme is influenza.The site uses many tools like Google Knol and NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) database called Rapid Research Notes, Both which are created and moderated by the experts in the field.The value of this type of information sources is that they are available to anyone from anywhere with internet connection.PLoS Currents: Influenza welcomes contributions covering any and all aspects of research into influenza: influenza virology, genetics, immunity, structural biology, genomics, epidemiology, modeling, evolution, policy and control. Contributions might take the form of new datasets, preliminary analyses or entire manuscripts. The launch site already features new findings from some outstanding influenza researchers.

Friday, August 07, 2009

First of all Thanks goes to Anchor Sanchez for having a backbone and CNN for allowing him to have one.CNN's Sanchez today smacked Rick Scott, the founder of an organization, Conservatives for Patients' Rights, that's been funding anti-health care reform protests. People this do gooder is the former CEO of a hospital company that paid $1.7 billion to settle charges of overcharging Medicare and Medicaid.Read more about it at TPM after the video; Turn your volume up and listen and you may learn why the healthcare is in such a bad state.

In a guidance issued today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says that certain pharmaceutical ingredients used in the manufacture or preparation of drug products should be tested for melamine.

Melamine is a synthetic chemical with a variety of industrial uses including the production of resins and foams, cleaning products, fertilizers and pesticides. If ingested in sufficient amounts, melamine can result in kidney failure and death.

Although the FDA has no reason to believe that the U.S. pharmaceutical supply is contaminated with melamine, recent events involving pet and livestock food products in the United States, and milk products for infants in China, underscore the potential problem.

“The FDA urges implementation of appropriate controls to assure consumers that melamine contamination will not happen in the pharmaceutical supply chain,” said Commissioner of Food and Drugs Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D. “We look forward to working with industry on this serious public health concern.”

The FDA identifies specific pharmaceutical ingredients in the guidance that are recommended to be screened for the presence of melamine. The guidance also recommends the use of FDA-published methods for this testing that are used to detect the presence of melamine in food proteins. These tests rely on equipment that is generally available to pharmaceutical manufacturers or contract testing labs. The agency also is developing a sampling and testing program for pharmaceutical ingredients at risk for melamine contamination.

Comments may be submitted electronically at http://www.regulations.gov or by mail to FDA, Division of Dockets Management (HFA-305), 5630 Fishers Lane, Rm. 1061, Rockville, MD 20852. All comments should be identified with docket number FDA-2009-D-0354.

Monday, August 03, 2009

Savient Pharmaceuticals (SVNT) announced that it has received a complete response letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration stating that the FDA cannot at this time approve the Company's application for KRYSTEXXA as a treatment for chronic gout in patients refractory to conventional therapy.Market News Video

Sen. Chris Dodd will spend the month of August working for national health care reform. He will also be dealing with his own health care, stemming from detection of cancer. Goog Luck with both, Senetor. We need both.

Deadly parasite jumped to humans from chimpanzees, perhaps through one mosquito

— Irvine, Calif., August 3, 2009 —

Researchers have identified what they believe is the original source of malignant malaria: a parasite found in chimpanzees in equatorial Africa.

UC Irvine biologist Francisco Ayala and colleagues think the deadly parasite was transmitted to humans from chimpanzees perhaps as recently as 5,000 years ago - and possibly through a single mosquito, genetic analyses indicate. Previously, malaria's origin had been unclear.

This discovery could aid the development of a vaccine for malaria, which sickens about 500 million people and kills about 1.5 million each year. It also furthers understanding of how infectious diseases such as HIV, SARS, and avian and swine flu can be transmitted to humans from animals.

"When malaria transferred to humans, it became very severe very quickly," said Ayala, co-author of the study that reports these findings. "The disease in humans has become resistant to many drugs. It's my hope that our discovery will bring us closer to making a vaccine."

The study appears online the week of Aug. 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Human malignant malaria is caused by a parasite called Plasmodium falciparum, which is responsible for 85 percent of all infections and nearly all malaria deaths. Chimpanzees were known to carry a closely related parasite called Plasmodium reichenowi, but most scientists assumed the two had existed separately in humans and chimpanzees for the last 5 million years.

Scientists in the current study examined several new strains of the parasite found in blood taken from wild and wild-born chimpanzees in Cameroon and Ivory Coast sanctuaries during routine health exams.

A gene analysis linked one chimpanzee strain to all worldwide strains of the human malaria parasite. This connection suggests that one mosquito may have transferred malaria to humans. Because there is little genetic variance among strains of the human parasite, scientists believe the transmission occurred in the recent past - maybe 5,000 to 2 million years ago - though an exact time could not be determined.

The results support an earlier hypothesis by Dr. Ajit Varki of UC San Diego and colleagues that genetic mutations made humans first resistant to sickness from the chimpanzee parasite, then extremely susceptible to illness from the human form.

They also corroborate an earlier finding by Ayala and former UCI graduate student Stephen Rich that malignant malaria started spreading throughout the tropics and world about 5,000 years ago, when agriculture began in Africa. Rich, now a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the lead author of the current PNAS study.

In addition to Ayala and Rich, Nathan Wolfe of Stanford University worked on the study, along with collaborators from the Robert Koch Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany; the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative in San Francisco; the Biotechnology Centre in Cameroon; the U.S. Department of Agriculture; and the Ebola Tai Forest Project in the Ivory Coast.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, with additional support from the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University and the National Geographic Society Committee for Research & Exploration.

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is a top-ranked university dedicated to research, scholarship and community service. Led by Chancellor Michael Drake since 2005, UCI is among the fastest-growing University of California campuses, with more than 27,000 undergraduate and graduate students, 1,100 faculty and 9,200 staff. The top employer in dynamic Orange County, UCI contributes an annual economic impact of $4.2 billion. For more UCI news, visit http://today.uci.edu/.